Droit

Somewhere on a trading floor, a machine just read the rulebook for you

Atrader at a global bank clicks to execute a cross-border derivatives trade. Before the order leaves the desk, a question fires off in the background: is this allowed - here, today, for this client, under this jurisdiction's reporting regime? A decade ago a compliance officer might have answered that next quarter. At Droit's clients, the answer comes back in milliseconds, with a receipt.

That receipt is the whole point. Droit doesn't just say yes or no. It shows the regulatory text it relied on, the interpretation the industry agreed to, and the path the decision took. The trade is evidenced before it happens, not reconstructed after a regulator asks.

Droit is a computational-law firm in New York. Its patented platform, Adept, turns the dense, contradictory, constantly-changing body of financial regulation into something a computer can execute. Banks the size of small nations run their trades through it. In March 2026, FIS bought the company outright.

Regulation is written for humans. Trades happen at the speed of machines.

After the 2008 crisis, the rulebook exploded. Dodd-Frank, EMIR, MiFID, and a parade of cross-border reporting regimes landed on banks more or less at once. Each was thousands of pages of prose. Each had edge cases. None agreed perfectly with the others.

Banks handled it the way large organizations handle most things: with people, spreadsheets, and meetings. Armies of analysts read the rules, argued about what they meant, and encoded their best guess into systems that were out of date by the time they shipped. The work was manual, expensive, and - worst of all - hard to prove. When a regulator asked "why did you decide this trade was reportable?", the honest answer was often a shrug and a binder.

The tension Droit exists to resolve is exactly this gap: regulation is written in ambiguous human language, but it has to be applied with machine precision, millions of times a day, across dozens of jurisdictions, and defended on demand. Closing that gap is harder than it sounds, because it is not really a software problem or a legal problem. It is both at once.

A derivatives banker decided the rulebook was a codebase

Brock Arnason had spent years on the other side of this problem. At Morgan Stanley he ran product for the Matrix fixed-income platform and led the firm's SEF strategy and Dodd-Frank compliance programs. Before that, at UBS, he led technology for credit and interest-rate derivatives. He had personally lived the spreadsheet years.

In 2012, he and co-founder Satya Pemmaraju made a contrarian bet: that regulation is, underneath the prose, a system of formal logic - and that if you treated it like code rather than like literature, you could compute compliance instead of merely documenting it. They called the discipline "computational law." The name Droit, French for "law" (and, conveniently, "right"), was not subtle.

The bet required an unusual team: lawyers who could read a statute, former trading-desk operators who knew what a real transaction looked like, and engineers who could turn both into deterministic logic. The promise was that the interpretations would not be one bank's private guess but an industry consensus, mapped line by line back to the source text. Auditable by design.

Adept: a decision engine with a memory and a paper trail

At the center sits Adept, the patented decision engine. Feed it a transaction and it evaluates permissibility against the encoded rules, returns a determination, and - the part competitors find hardest to copy - hands back the full reasoning: which regulation, which interpretation, which path. Decision traceability is not a feature bolted on. It is the architecture.

Around the engine, Droit built a suite for the trade lifecycle:

Six products, one stubborn idea: the answer is worthless unless you can show your work.

From a contrarian idea to FIS's core infrastructure

The customers are the kind that don't take chances

You can tell a lot about enterprise software by who runs it. Droit's publicly associated clients read like a roll call of global capital markets: UBS, Goldman Sachs, Wells Fargo, RBC Capital Markets, Credit Agricole CIB, Westpac. These are institutions that audit their vendors harder than most companies audit themselves.

Numbers a compliance officer can love: the boring kind, audited twice.

When a $55M raise produces a credible revenue figure larger than the raise itself, investors tend to notice.

The recognition followed the adoption. Risk.net named Droit its Governance, Risk and Compliance Solution of the Year. A partnership with KOR Financial paired Droit's consensus-eligibility service with KOR's reporting platform - a quiet admission from the industry that banks shouldn't each be guessing the rules separately.

Make the right answer the default, and make it provable

Droit's stated mission is to translate complex regulation into precise, executable logic. Underneath the corporate phrasing is something more interesting: a belief that compliance should be a property of the system, not a department that cleans up afterward. If the trade can't be evidenced against the rules, it shouldn't happen. If it can, the proof should already exist.

That is why two of Droit's investors, UBS and Goldman Sachs, are also its customers. They were not betting on a vendor. They were betting on infrastructure they already depended on - and would rather own a piece of than merely rent.

The acquisition is the argument

When FIS - one of the largest financial-technology companies in the world - acquired Droit in March 2026, it wasn't buying a niche tool. It was buying a thesis: that regulatory logic belongs inside core trading infrastructure, not bolted to the side of it. FIS plans to embed Adept across trading, post-trade and reporting, turning real-time compliance determinations into a default behavior of the plumbing itself.

That is the quiet endgame of computational law. Not a smarter compliance department - no compliance department visible at all, because the rulebook is already running in the background of every transaction. The trade either evidences itself, or it doesn't go through.

So return to that trading floor. The trader clicks to execute the cross-border derivatives trade. The question still fires off - is this allowed? - but nobody waits for it anymore, because the answer arrives with the trade, carrying its own proof. The compliance binder is gone. The shrug is gone. What's left is a decision that can explain itself. That is the change Droit set out to make in 2012, and the reason a company most people have never heard of ended up inside the infrastructure that moves the markets.